The Internet is a vast computer network consisting of many smaller networks that span the entire World. The Internet and the number of users has grown rapidly in recent years. Indeed millions of people per day connect to the Internet using both permanent and dial up connections. The computers, or networks of computers, connected to the Internet are referred to as “hosts”, allow public access to files, documents and data covering a vast array of content such as information relating to current events, the weather, financial matters, business matters, entertainment, lifestyle issues, industrial matters, science, sports, society, international affairs, technology, etc
The content on the Internet is made available to the public through “servers”. A server is a computer system running on an Internet host that makes its contents available to the public. A user may use their computer (typically an home personal computer or Internet connected workstation, known as the “client”) to request that information contained on the server be distributed via the Internet so that is may be displayed by the user's computer. The server will distribute the requested contents to the client.
The World-Wide Web (Web) is a system for accessing information on the Internet that allows a user to navigate the Internet resources intuitively, without knowledge of specific addresses of information content or other technical information. The Web is made up of numerous Web “pages” that can be displayed by a client's computer to the user, typically by the client computer using a Web browser. The Internet servers provide the Web pages from their location on the Web, known as their Web sites.
Companies which deal in the business of reporting news and the like, such as newspapers and television channels and news agencies generally, have realised the value of supplying information via the Internet and have set up their own Web sites to facilitate this dissemination.
Due to the success of this dissemination there are now a multiplicity of Web sites providing online news and information that may be of interest to a user.
With the continued expansion of online news Web sites, it has become increasingly difficult for users to sift through the vast array of information that is available in order to locate information which is of particular interest to them.
Out of this disarray has risen a service which scours the Web to obtain targeted information that is of interest to a user's specific requirements. This targeted information is aggregated and provided to the user in a feed. Such is the success of this model of information delivery, it is becoming the most popular delivery model of information to users of the Web. The principal benefit of this aggregated model of delivery being that it saves the user a great deal of time compared to manually acquiring content from individual Web sites.
Whilst this aggregation can be provided via payment methods such as subscriptions or the like, some users are not in a position where they can easily afford the expense, or may simply prefer not to incur a great deal of expenditure in gathering information which is of interest to them. In order to make such information aggregation available without financial incumbency, the cost of aggregating the information can be supported by providing the aggregated information together with advertisements. The revenue generated from the advertiser or advertising network in return for the inclusion of their advertisement will subsidise the free, or inexpensive, provision of the aggregated information.
To ensure that there are sufficient users of the free or inexpensive aggregated information, it is preferable that the amount of advertisements are controlled to ensure that the user does not feel as though they are being spammed. “Spammed” is used herein to mean an unacceptable amount of unsolicited advertisements or the like.
To guard against a user feeling as though they are being spammed, a user deploys software (reader software) which not only displays the aggregated information in an acceptable form to the user, but also prevents the user being faced with the same information, be it news content or advertisement, every time aggregated information is processed by the reader software.
Existing reader software has hitherto identified the uniqueness of the content of a feed by analysing the hyperlink of each component of the feed, be it news content or advertisements. The drawback of this however is that the hyperlink of the news contents and advertisements typically change on a differing basis.
The term “hyperlink” as used herein is to be understood to relate to any suitable means which allows an end user to conveniently access a document which possesses the full details of the component contained in the feed.
With news content, the hyperlink to each story or feature etc. will generally remain static. The hyperlink may change during the course of time but this will typically be in response to an update of the story or feature and, as such, the end user may wish to read this update. Therefore, hyperlinks provide a useful means of identifying whether the news content has been seen by the reader software previously, thus allowing the software to prevent repeated displays of the same news content to the end user during periods of a low flux of news content.
However, the use of hyperlinks as an identification means is not suitable where advertisements are concerned. Typically providers of advertisements will frequently change the hyperlink to subvert the identification strategy employed by the reader software and this can have several damaging implications.
Firstly, during periods of low flux of news content, the reader software analyses the hyperlinks of the components of the delivered feed and concludes that all of the news content been displayed to the end user previously. However the software would also identify that there was some new content in the form of the advertisements. Hence, only the advertisements would be displayed to the end user as being new. If this low flux of news content continued, the display to the end user could eventually consist of nothing but advertisements. Clearly this high level of advertisements, or spamming, would not be satisfactory to the end user.
Secondly, the constant changing of the advertisement's hyperlink could result in the same advertisement being repeatedly displayed to the end user. Indeed, in an extreme case, during a situation of low flux of news content, as described above, it is possible that the display to the user could be a series of identical advertisements only being distinguishable from each other by virtue of having different hyperlinks. Such a situation would clearly be deeply unsatisfactory to the end user.
Thirdly, this situation can impair the contextual accuracy of the advertisements.
Fourthly, advertising networks are often desirous of changing the hyperlink in order to steer different people toward different advertisements. Advertising networks operate independently of the feeds discussed herein and, thus, are not within the scope of the present invention. These advertising networks investigate the use of advertisements by end users and employ sophisticated techniques to determine whether an advertisement is accessed, how deeply it is accessed and which advertisements are accessed more than others. The changing of the hyperlink affords the advertising network a greater degree of sophistication when deploying their techniques.
Fifthly, advertising networks will also frequently change the hyperlink to avoid fraudulent clicks, often referred to as click fraud. Click fraud is when a business receives invalid clicks on a paid advertisement listing by a competitor or individual having no intention of using the service or purchasing the goods under the advertisement. A click is invalid when the person making the click does it for the sole purpose of costing the advertiser money or financial harm. Click fraud may occur from competing advertisers or simply individuals just wanting to harm or frustrate the advertiser.
For the reasons stated above, and for other reasons stated below which will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon reading and understanding the present specification, there is a need in the art for systems and methods which improve contextual advertising within streams of content provided to end users.